Building Trusted Messengers with Dan Pfeiffer | Hello Merge Tag Ep. 16

“We have to rethink communications in the progressive movement. It is less about a candidate or a campaign or a spokesperson for a campaign delivering a message to the traditional media who then deliver that message to voters, and more thinking about our audience and our supporters and our volunteers as messengers themselves who have the ability to amplify those messages.”

Dan Pfeiffer is a giant in the progressive messaging space.

Along with many impressive titles under his belt, he worked on the Obama campaign and served as senior advisor and White House Communications Director for President Obama.

He then went on to become an influencer for democracy (my term, don’t blame him). He’s a best-selling author and a co-host of Pod Save America. He also hosts the podcast Pollercoaster, co-hosts Political Experts React on YouTube and writes the extremely influential newsletter Message Box.

Needless to say, Dan is a man with a ton of insight into messaging for Democratic campaigns.

The primary purpose of Message Box is to create campaign messaging-style memos for everyday people.

Campaign staff and operatives write and receive these all the time. But Dan realized that we can no longer win elections simply relying on campaign staff and operatives.

If the Democratic party wants to win elections, at every level of government, we all have to be involved in the process.

So in Message Box, he shares talking points and context around the stories of the day, in a way that is useful and relatable not for full-time Hill staffers, but for anyone who wants to be involved in the march toward progress.

Because, in his words, “This whole election comes down to narrowing the news chasm between what is happening and the voters.”

We covered:

• The importance of trusted messengers and the need to give them the training to help get the message out
• Having different strategies for the public internet vs the private internet
• Why campaigns need to learn to give up control, and relinquish that control to their supporters. They know the people they’re communicating with, we have to trust them to speak in a way they know will resonate
• The brand of the Democrat Party—both what it is and what it could be
• What Democrats can learn from Trump’s nurturing of the MAGA media system
• The all-of-the-above approach to reaching your audience
• Spam PACs and what the Democratic Party can do about them
• What could have become of the Obama For America campaign infrastructure after President Obama won in 2008
• And so much more!

“If you lose the information war, you’re going to lose the political war and we have to invest in trying to win that information war and shift our mentality away from this simple idea that we’re gonna have our message, we’re gonna tell the press and the press is going to tell our voters into really think about distribution of our message.”

Find all episodes at HelloMergeTag.com or wherever you stream podcasts.

Links and Resources

• Twitter
• Instagram
• Message Box
• Pod Save America
• Organize or Else / Vote Save America
• Pollercoaster
• Political Experts React
• Demcast
• Dan’s books

Big thanks to our sponsor Civic Shout. Learn more about how they’re helping Democratic campaigns and progressive nonprofits build their lists ethically at civicshout.com/partners.

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